I noticed an online acquaintance 
the other day becoming extremely agitated that someone had referred to Christmas using the colloquialism Xmas. She felt that this was insulting, and offensive in the extreme. What she didn't realize was that Xmas as a shortened form for Christmas has a venerable, and solidly Christian, history.
The word Christmas is a compound of Christ + mass; we see it first in Old English in the form Cristes mæsse in 1038, according to the OED. The Old English form eventually evolved to the Middle English Christemasse. The word Christ is derived from the Greek word Christos, meaning "anointed," a literal translation of the Hebrew cognate of messiah.
The X of Xmas is a shorthand way to refer to the name of Christ. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the Greek letter Chi, written as X (and indeed the source of our own English letter X) is the first letter of Christ's name. X has been used as an abbreviation for Christ since at least the early 1500s. Earlier, and closely related abbreviations include Xp and Xr, from the Chi Rho and Iota, the Greek letters that spell the Chr, the first three letters of Christ. In medieval manuscripts and art, the Chi Rho pages are derived from the Chi and the Rho, and sometimes, the Iota or I of Christ. I note that in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, there's an entry that uses the shorthand of Xres masesse for Christmass; an abbreviation like Xmas is not so heretical, after all, and in truth, is quite traditional.
Printer-friendly version
